Space: 1999

I loved that show when I was a kid. Now they're showing old episodes on TV. Like most TV shows, it didn't live up to its opening credits. Had great theme music.

The special effects were 2001: A Space Odyssey-ish---at least it seemed like that at the time. I read the Space: 1999 comic books. I played with a staple gun because it was shaped kind of like the laser weapons they used.

It didn't make complete sense. The moon flies out of orbit. Instead of evacuating the base and getting back to Earth before it's too late, they decide to go hurtling through space and assume they would find another planet to colonize. It didn't take them long to start running into other planets.

It bothered me that, if I was going to live in outer space like the guys on the show, I would probably have to join the Air Force. There's no way I was doing that.

But I watch it now and it seems really slow. Like I had a longer attention span when I was 12 than I do now.

It seems strange that Martin Landau is willing to sacrifice the lives of everyone on Moonbase Alpha to save his girlfriend, Barbara Bain. Captain Kirk would never do that. I wouldn't mind it if their uniforms left more to the imagination. One season, they added collars. They looked better, but they're out in the space cut off from the Earth. Where did the collars come from?

It was British. Only the two stars were American. In one episode, an alien asks one of the guys why he had a different accent than the others. He explained that he was Australian. I couldn't distinguish an English accent from an Australian accent---how could a space alien tell them apart?